How to rebuild self esteem after being cheated on by your ex-girlfriend? It’s really hard to get back to proper confidence after an ex has cheated on you because effectively, being cheated on makes you feel like you weren’t good enough. So, how to get back to feeling like you’re a good man after you feel so degraded? Let’s talk about it.
Hey guys, welcome back to the Breakup Corner, I’m Andi Galster, and here I teach men how to move on from their ex-girlfriend. Wow, so, being cheated on isn’t easy on the psyche, and especially your self-esteem. When an ex-girlfriend cheats on you, it’s practically as if she’s been throwing you in the trash like an old razor that no longer does the trick, and she just jumped on to the next model. No pun intended, but such a wound cuts deep. When a woman replaces you with another man, even before the breakup, it makes you feel as if you weren’t useful.
As if being with you didn’t just make her unhappy, but rather, that being with you was a burden, and rather than trying to solve the problems or just leaving the relationship, she would rather find another man and not even bother with giving you the courtesy to be honest with you. It’s hard to say if there’s anything at all that’s more disrespectful than an ex who treated you like this, and this is why being cheated on by an ex-girlfriend is so hurtful. If there’s one thing that every man wants from his girlfriend, it’s to be respected. I’m sure many of you know how underappreciated you feel in relationships when your girlfriend doesn’t seem to respect you. If a man isn’t respected and needed by his girlfriend or wife, he feels as if his entire purpose as a provider is no longer valid.
It’s a really difficult feeling having to confront those emotions. I think most men are pretty simple. Most men want a good, kind and loving woman by their sides, and their needs in a relationship are pretty straightforward. If our partner is respectful, loving, and nurturing, we’re mostly satisfied with the relationship. Of course, great sex also never hurts. Most of us want a simple relationship, but we want this relationship to be with a great woman.
And so we always work as hard as we can to be as attractive to the opposite sex. We want to always show ourselves from our best side, to be seen as competent, stable, mature, intelligent, and so on. It’s part of our DNA. The pursuit of excellence, and eventually being recognized as excellent by a woman who loves us is what drives us to get up in the morning. Every day that we get up, we work hard on ourselves so that one day, we will get to live the dream. To have the great woman by our side. Maybe have a family. Buy a house, own some pets. And so on. Call me an idealistic guy, but I think a lot of men resonate with this. Most men want to commit to a dream-like lifestyle, with life-long commitments. And we make sacrifices to get there.
And this is why it’s so detrimental to our self-esteem when all of that hard work that we put in goes unappreciated by the woman that we thought we could trust the most. Isn’t that one of the things that hurts you the most about your ex-girlfriend cheating on you? You were willing to work so hard, sacrifice for her, make compromises and sometimes prioritize her needs over your own, and then when all was said and done, she just found another man as if all your investments in the relationship meant nothing?
That’s what stings so much about a woman who chooses to cheat. A man’s commitment to a woman often goes unnoticed, but I’m sure you can relate how difficult it is to always be on top of it all, to always be the stable provider, to slip up as little as possible. All a man wants for his hard work is to be seen for it and be appreciated. And when he’s not appreciated, he doesn’t want to have to beg for respect, but rather, just as he made sacrifices for his woman, he wants his woman to meet him halfway and express her needs and talk about where the relationship needs to be improved, rather than running off to the next-best man the moment things no longer look picture-perfect.
It’s a simple request that most women should be able to provide for all the hard work that a man puts into a relationship. And when your ex-girlfriend didn’t live up to that simple expectation, it feels as if you must be the worst man on the planet. Rather than trying to repair the relationship when necessary, or worst case, leaving the relationship when it got too bad, she chose to betray you in the worst way possible. She acted as if all your hard work for the relationship was something to be trampled on. And that’s where you might be wrong with how you feel after the breakup.
Your commitment to a relationship should never be something that can be walked all over. If the woman that you were with couldn’t even show you enough respect to communicate with you directly why she was unhappy in the relationship, then you shouldn’t feel bad. Your value as a man is not determined by the actions of an ex-girlfriend who didn’t know how to love appropriately in a relationship. Yes, even at times of dissatisfaction, or even resentment, choosing how to love is possible. Not only is it possible, it’s what good partners do. Rather than finding reasons why to punish their partner for not making them happy, good partners seek ways to repair the relationship, despite the resentment that’s been built up over the years — because that’s what it means to love somebody.
So if you lack self-esteem after your ex-girlfriend cheated on you, and if you perhaps think that you weren’t good enough, or that some other man was better than you, then you need to think twice about that. Even if there were ways how you didn’t follow through properly in the relationship, this doesn’t mean that you deserved to be mistreated. You should never measure your self-esteem based on an ex-girlfriend’s behavior. Especially related to infidelity. In the end, every person makes their own choices, and even when you had characteristics that caused an ex to not appreciate you for a period of time, it’s not a reflection of who you are as a man in general, nor does it ever justify to choose disrespectful and outright hurtful behaviors in a relationship.
Nobody would ever tell a woman who was physically abused by a man that it is her who should lack confidence and security due to the way she was treated by her ex-boyfriend. Of course, it would be the boyfriend’s fault for abusing her. Even if the woman would have gone out of her way to provoke her boyfriend a lot of times, consciously chose fights, and so on, still, in the end, the abuse wouldn’t be her fault. She may have been the trigger for the man choosing to abuse her, but in the end, it was the man who responded even more poorly to her poor behavior. As such, the most important thing to recognize about self-esteem after cheating is that it always takes two to tango.
When one partner mistreated the other, it’s usually both sides who contributed to the problem. Not always, of course, but the point that I am making here is that the person who was mistreated often treats their toxic relationship as a one-sided affair, where they feel that we were the only one who contributed to the situation. Just because you were cheated on doesn’t mean that you deserved to be cheated on. Just because your ex-girlfriend no longer felt attracted to you, was fed up with you, began to resent you, etc., doesn’t mean that you are generally low in attractiveness, not worth respecting, inevitably someone to resent, and so on.
Sure, it’s always a great idea to identify what part you played in the relationship. On average, unless you are dating an extremely toxic woman who uses toxic behaviors chronically, you probably added fuel to the fire. Most women don’t just randomly cheat. Nor do most men casually lay a hand on their girlfriends. Obviously, for most individuals, these extreme behaviors are triggered by frustration, and if you ever have been in a relationship where you motivated your partner to act out in an extremely abusive way, then you should learn to which degree you may have contributed to the situation, but in the end, you cannot make yourself solely responsible for your ex-girlfriend’s actions.
If your ex cheated on you, you don’t need to feel any less about yourself. You’re still a man who’s worth being respected, loved, appreciated, and chosen to be cherished by another woman, every single day. Sometimes, the woman we are with simply isn’t able to recognize the value that we bring to a relationship. A woman who knows how to love properly, and who sees the value of her man, will always choose to find ways to bridge the gap between him and her when there are relationship problems.
If you were with a woman who didn’t choose to do so, then all you have learned is what type of woman will not be the right woman for you to grow old with. I guarantee you there is a woman out there for you who already right now sees what an amazing man you are. Everything is relative.
To your ex-girlfriend, you were not good enough, whereas to another woman, you trying as hard as you can is worth keeping. The best advice I can give you if you lack self-esteem is to meet simple women, who don’t set unrealistic standards or expectations for men. Most women just want to feel close to a man, they want to be loved by him, and they will do everything it takes to stay close to him. There are many women out there who can show you that you are still an amazing man who deserves commitment in good and bad times of a relationship. Don’t give up hope. This woman is out there for you and you are going to find her eventually.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you this time.
